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Most of the year is spent prepping for entrance exams (the series Lucky*Star and Lovely*Complex addressed this somewhat as did Love Hina).
You can apply to any college or university. Your hopes of getting in are directly tied to your scores on the university entrance exams and which high school you attended.
Getting into Todai is a bit like getting into Harvard/Yale with a dash of Stanford/MIT (though there are science and engineering schools equally difficult to get into ... Todai is where a lot of future power brokers come from: lawyers, government, politicians).
Which high school you attended was based on your high school entrance exam and scoring the levels that high school required (different high schools have different scoring minimums). You apply to high schools just as you do for college.
Early mistakes in academic life directly impact your later range of choices -- hence the uber-pressure that extends all the way down to pre-school. It isn't really unique to Japan but they, like most asian countries, take it up a notch.
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